www.reuters.com/article/d...

This is the kind of thing that makes me lose faith in humanity. The "thou shalt not lie" banner gave me a small glimmer of hope, but the last bit about 50% (!@##%$@#@#$?????) of people believing in this crock of shit, kinda killed it.

Dinosaurs. On a boat. with people. Might as well just call it the Barney T. Rubble memorial museum.

Do people seriously believe that all the species of animals IN THE ENTIRE WORLD lived within walking distance of Noah's house? If so, I have this amazing bridge I want to sell you.

In my Turkish class today we were doing exercises using a verb tense that signifies habits or general characteristic about people. It was going fairly well until we get to the last two exercises. In one we were supposed to fill in the blanks with the positive or negative form of verbs to make generalized statements about women and men. It went like this:
Women-
Gossip a lot.
Cry all the time.
Like to shop.
Don't know anything about cars.
Men-
Don't cry.
Like to fix things.
Enjoy soccer.
.... well you get the picture. This irked me a little. Then we get to the next exercise. We are given a country and something that everyone from that country likes and were expect to make a sentence about it.
We were given the following:
China/rice
Russia/vodka
Japan/sake
Italy/pizza
America/baseball
.....I think they forgot one: Turkey/stereotypes.

Today a professor from the university here led a sightseeing tour of some of the famous mosques in the city. He took us to the Sulemaniye mosque built by the famous Sinan and a couple of other I have been meaning to see.

It was a pretty typical tour up until the point when he steps onto a stone near the wall of a mosque and declares that it is the most historical stone in the city. It doesn't look like much. It's kind of overgrown and there is a tree growing next to it. He points out a couple of grooves in the rock and explains to us that they are axe marks. Apparently this is the stone where all of the Jannissaries were killed in the 1820's. There were 40,000 of them.

The morbid part of my brain went "Whoah! Dude! 40,000 people were killed right here!" and the other half went "ugh". I took a picture of it.

Funny how some random obscure stone could have such significance, no?

So! I have discovered a store here that sells teriaki sauce!  I am excited about this because now my diet will consist of something other than bread, cheese, or lentils.  Turkish food is excellent, but it doesn't have much variety.   And since a lot of the fruit isn't in season, it's way too expensive.  We'll ignore the fact I've made this discovery 8 months into my stay here. 

I don't have finals until the second week of June, but to make up for it I have a test every Thursday until the 24th.  All of which I will fail, literaly.  But it's ok, because so will everyone else in the class.  I love curves. 

Also note to self: pickle flavored gum can only end in disaster. 

So, it's about 1:15am where I live right now. Mayhap I should go to bed right now, and write a more interesting post another day.